


Just A Spark

by SilverDagger



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Canon-Compliant, Gen, Storytelling, background yumikuri, gen - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-14
Updated: 2015-03-14
Packaged: 2018-03-17 18:10:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3539105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilverDagger/pseuds/SilverDagger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the two of them are caught in a storm during a training exercise, Ymir tells Armin a tale from outside the Walls, and they both begin to see each other a little more clearly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Just A Spark

**Author's Note:**

> Fill for the kink-meme prompt "Ymir knows stories that aren't in any of Armin's books."
> 
> The story Ymir tells is The Tinderbox, by Hans Christian Anderson, with a few embellishments. Armin's comment about giants is taken from a book I read years back on French and German fairy tales, and I'd provide a source if I could remember it, but I can't, so all there is to know is that I didn't come up with it myself.

It's during a wilderness survival exercise that Armin first starts to wonder - really wonder - whether anyone could live outside the Walls. They need to make their way back to the training camp without maps and only the very barest of supplies, and they need to do it in teams of two.

He's been paired with Ymir, that tall, ungainly girl who hangs around Krista and tells the crudest jokes he's ever heard and bullies Sasha and Connie whenever she gets bored. He wasn't hoping to get stuck with her, but he can't imagine she was hoping to get stuck with him either. And there's not a lot of time for either of them to spend complaining, not if they want to make it to shelter before those ominous clouds on the horizon become less of a threat and more of an immediate problem.

He wonders if Shadis held this exercise off until there was a storm on the horizon, because there's no point in sending the trainees out to survive the ravages of balmy weather, or letting them navigate by the stars, but that kind of speculation is useless, and it would hardly make a difference if he did.

Thunder rolls somewhere close, and Ymir curses and picks up her pace. He hurries after her as fast as his legs can carry him in a futile effort to outrun the weather, both of them moving quicker than he's used to but not - he's suddenly, shamefully certain - as fast as she could move without him to weigh her down. But they make it to the treeline before the storm breaks, and into the dense brush of the forest just as rain starts coming down in earnest, driving hard against their backs and leaving him more grateful than he's ever been for waterproofed canvas.

They pitch their camp in a small dell that night, away from the tallest trees - Ymir says with a critical eye on the darkening sky that they're not likely to get safer, and with any luck they're too high for flooding, and the towering pines further up the ridge will draw the lightning. She puts together a lean-to out of pine branches to keep off the rain, and they huddle beneath it in the cold, damp dark, a single flickering lantern throwing shadows across their faces. It's not as cold as it could be, but he's tired and he's hungry with only a half-ration to go on, and he doesn't know what to make of the girl sitting across from him, watching him like some predatory bird might eye a mouse. For a moment, illumined by the flash of lightning outside, she looks like a stranger. 

Then, as the thunder cracks overhead and the afterimages fade from his vision, she says, "you like stories, don't you?"

Armin doesn't answer immediately, but then, he's not sure it had actually been a question, and he wonders what she's going to do about it, whatever he tells her. There's something about her not dissimilar to the boys in Shinganshina who used to rip the books from his hands and grind his face into the dirt - lean and shifty-eyed, looking for weakness. But all she says is, "I got a few good ones, if you wanna listen?"

"Sure," he says, still half-expecting a joke at his expense, but there is no joke; she nods, businesslike, cracks her knuckles loud enough to make him wince, and leans forward to begin.

"So there's a soldier, right?" she says. "This was before the Walls went up, and there weren't any titans around, so people spent a lot of time trying to kill each other instead. And there's this soldier, and he's wounded, so the old bastard of a king sends him off with nothing to his name but the sword at his side and the coat on his back."

Armin settles in to listen, and as she talks, he feels himself relaxing, sinking into it the way he used to sink into a good book, the fear and discomfort of the real world retreating into insignificance. It's not a tale he's heard before. He thought he knew them all - or no, not all of them, he knows enough to realize how small his own world must be - but all the ones he would ever hear. But as Ymir tells of the soldier's descent into a hollow tree on a witch's errand - her voice slipping into a storyteller's rhythm interspersed with cussing - Armin can practically imagine it: piles of copper and silver and gold, more riches than any peasant soldier could dream of, and the black dogs the guard the way, giant beasts with fiery eyes. They snarl at him, but he does what the witch tells him and and they offer him no harm.

The soldier fills his pockets with coin - which is stupid, Armin thinks, because with anything that seems too good or too easy, in stories like these, there's always some sort of catch - and he finds the witch's prize too, the grubby little tinderbox she's after, and he makes his way out again from the dark world beneath the ground. But when the old crone tries to claim the thing she sent him down for, he won't give it back.

"Don't make sense, you see, all that treasure beneath the ground and all she wants is this old piece of junk. He figures she's gotta be keeping something back, and when he asks, she won't tell him nothing at all. So what do you think he does?" Ymir claps her hands, a resounding slap that makes him jump in place, and says, almost gleeful, "off with her head!"

"Just like that?" he says. "For not answering a question?"

She gives him a flat look, like he's just said something embarrassingly childish. "Sure. Just like that. It's a story, not a morality play."

She's right, of course. That's the way fairy stories are, and it's hard to say why it's so much more shocking now, by lantern light, told in Ymir's rhythmic cadence. Because he doesn't know the ending, maybe. Because he's never heard this one before. But Ymir doesn't leave him a lot of time to mull it over; the story goes on, and the soldier is on the road again, weighed down with riches.

"And when he gets to the city, which is where he's going with his newfound fortune, he learns they've got a princess locked up in a tower, guarded night and day, and why do you think that is?"

After a moment, it becomes clear that she isn't going to go on until Armin makes a guess.

"She turns into something," he ventures, thinking through the tales he knows. "A monster." His grandfather's books were full of ogres in human disguises, and humans cursed to take animal form, freed by a kiss or a witch's death. But thinking of those stories just makes him remember the old man on his way outside the Wall, his back bent over from the weight of his pack and his eyes fixed forward, and he can do that without crying these days, but not without getting angry.

"Nah, that's a different story," Ymir says. "I'll tell you that one too, someday." Her eyes are distant, and her voice goes soft as she continues "she was prophesied to marry a soldier. The princess. And you can't have that, a princess taking up with some ugly old scar-faced son of a bitch who kills people for a living, so they shut her up somewhere and threw away the key, and no one asked what she thinks about the whole set-up at all."

She trails off, and the not-quite-silence of the forest falls again. Raindrops patter on the roof of their pine-branch shelter, and sometimes drip through, and out beyond the circle of light, he can hear the sound of hunting owls. No titans, of course, not even any wolves, but it's funny how much their campsite feels like a Wall, and he can't help thinking of everything dangerous outside it.

"And he rescues her?" he says, more for a distraction from the quiet than anything else. Whatever trance had come over her, she snaps out of it at the sound of his voice, but not before he knows he's caught a glimpse of something entirely different from the boys in Shinganshina.

"Nah. Thinks about it. But he can't."

That's a job for heroes anyways, she tells him, and this bastard she's talking about was never a hero, just a soldier, just the kind of rough brute who would lop the head off an old woman for no other reason than because she's there, and in his way. He's not the type for rescuing anyone. So he wastes his money - "pisses it away on wine and women and gambling," Ymir says, "gives it away to any sorry son of a bitch that needs it" - and soon enough he's got nothing left. Only a broken-down attic in winter and the memory of better times.

"And it's dark and it's cold and by this point, he's damn near starving, and all he's got for warmth is this shitty little tinderbox and a candle stub. So he strikes a spark."

She pauses, watching him with narrowed, assessing eyes. "You don't have many stories like this around here, do you?"

"What do you mean?" he asks, and she leans forward, rests her arms on her bony knees and meets his eyes, too direct for comfort.

"Where the commoner wins."

"No," Armin says slowly, after a time. "Not many stories like that."

"Maybe you shouldn't go spreading this one around either."

Armin nods. "My grandfather used to say that a giant in a fairy story - that giants, they're not titans, and when you tell a story about beating a giant, that's also a story about getting one over on anyone who's too strong to fight."

Ymir considers that, and just for a moment, when she looks at him, it's with something like respect.

"Not many giants in the stories where I come from," she says. "But yeah, I see what you're saying."

"So he strikes a spark," Armin says, hushed, and Ymir nods, as quiet as he is.

"Right. A spark. And next thing he knows, this gigantic dog busts through the door with its eyes afire. He thinks it's gonna kill him, but it just pads up to him and bows its head and growls 'what is thy bidding, master?'" Ymir affects a low, gravelly voice that should be ridiculous but isn't - caught up in the spell of the story, he can practically see the flames burning in her own eyes, and he wants to know what happens next. And so he listens as the dogs bring money, copper and silver and gold, a riotous feast and a flagon of wine, all the things that people dream of when they're cold and hungry and alone in an attic, with nowhere left to go.

"And that," Ymir says, "is about when the sorry bastard realizes that he can have anything he wants. And there's the princess, right, locked up in her tower, and he doesn't want - he just wants to see her. To know what she looks like. So that's what he asks for, and as soon as he says it, the third dog dashes out the window into the night, and when it comes back it's carrying the princess on its back."

By the end of it, she's talking softly again, like she's under a spell herself. Armin goes still, not even moving to wipe the rain from his brow, because he thinks that if he does anything now - moves or speaks or even breaths too loudly - it will snap her out of it, and whatever side of her he's seeing will be lost.

"And she was - " Ymir's voice fractures a little " - _impossibly_ beautiful, and kind-hearted in a way that would get you killed in a world like this one, and she didn't actually care that she'd just been kidnapped by some destitute in an attic - prob'ly because he was the first person she ever met who wasn't trying to keep her locked up - and they spent the entire night doing things that would make steam come out your ears."

Any other time, Armin would have been incensed by that. He's not as much of a child as everyone keeps assuming, and even if being underestimated is better than being taken seriously by people you can't trust, it still grates. But beneath the ribald grin, there are all the things she isn't saying, the chill of winter and the emptiness, and he knows that feeling too, the way world looks when all that's left to you is a single spark. He imagines a soldier dreaming in the darkness, hungry for something he can never have, and he shivers beneath his rain-spattered coat and tells her to keep talking, because he needs to know how this ends.

The way stories always do, he's sure - with a death or a wedding - but just like stories always do, it needs the telling to make it real.

"And it goes on like that for a while," Ymir says. "Every night he calls her to him on the back of a black dog with fire in its eyes, and they fall in love, as much as anyone can, and as much as anyone can be happy, they are. And then one day, the king of the land realizes that the princess is talking about things she ain't ever talked about before, like the city streets and the poor quarter and the rest of the world outside her windows, and that night he sets a watch on the tower to see where his dearest daughter is getting off to."

And of course, Armin thinks, if the old soldier had only been smart, they would never have caught him, with those dogs at his call. But he sleeps without wariness, secure in his riches and his happiness, and when the king's guard find him they take him unawares, and it all ends with the soldier tied to a stake out in the courtyard with a wall of rifles trained on his heart, and the king's daughter clapped in irons herself and waiting to watch her lover die.

"But they're civilized people in this kingdom," Ymir says, "and that means before they kill you, you get one request. And what do you think the soldier asks for?"

"I don't know," he says, though by now he thinks he does.

"A cigarette," she says, smiling wider than he's ever seen, all teeth. "A cigarette and a spark."

She describes what happens after that with bloodthirsty élan - the way the dogs scatter the soldiers like horses scatter pigeons, all fear and sudden chaos, the closest thing he's seen to a bloody rout since he was on the wrong side of one during the wars.

"And the king?" Armin says, knowing the answer already.

"Oh, he kills that fucker dead. Has the dogs throw him up in the air, and then dash him down and break his neck, and believe me, that's not the worst way you can go, so after all the wars and all that bastard done, it's not like he's got any call for complaining."

And after that, of course, the story ends as fairy tales do. Ymir lingers a while on the wedding, the kind of cake they serve and the music played, and on how the black dogs tore down the new queen's former prison stone by stone.

"And the important thing," she says, a little roughly, "the important thing is that they both ruled long and well, and put an end to all the fighting," and whether any of that was a part of the original tale or not, Armin has no way to know.

"And that's it," Ymir says, sounding tired, wrung out by the telling. "Happily ever after. The way it oughta be." A wedding, not a death, and a kingdom ruled without sending the wounded off to die or locking anyone up in towers to stop them marrying who they like, and an old woman somewhere who never got a funeral. The story's over, and if you don't count the witch, it ended well. 

The story's over, and they're still here. And he's still in a pine lean-to in a forest he's never seen before with an ache in his back and an empty stomach and rain dripping down his collar, and there are still wolves howling somewhere down in the valley, a long way away. Shadows move on Ymir's face, and now that the story's over, she seems like half a stranger again.

"Ymir," he says. His voice sounds very hoarse, though he's not the one who's been speaking, and he's not sure what he's saying now, or why it seems important, only that it is. "Wherever that story came from, you aren't there anymore."

"Sure," she says. "I know that." For a second she seems on the verge of saying something else, but the moment passes, and she punches his shoulder hard enough to bruise and gives him a not-very-reassuring grin. "Get some rest, kid. I'll make sure you don't get et."

Armin lies back and rests his head on his pack, but he can't sleep, probably wouldn't be able to even if wolves weren't a concern, and so he keeps his eyes just barely open and watches Ymir looking out into the darkness, shoulders hunched beneath her canvas coat. He wonders how many other tales she has locked away, stories no one here has heard before, and whether he's the only one she has to tell them to. Krista would listen, he thinks, but maybe they're not the kind of stories you can tell to Krista, or not without saying too much, or having it all come out wrong. He thinks about giants in fairytales, and princesses, and his grandfather walking to his death with head held high, and he wonders what he's been trusted with today.

He isn't sure how long it takes him to finally close his eyes that night. All he knows is that Ymir doesn't wake him for his watch, and true to promise she doesn't let him get et by anything worse than mosquitos, and by the time he opens his eyes again, she's got a small, smoky fire going, and some mushrooms cooking over it, speared on a stick.

 _Strange,_ he thinks, _how the wilderness changes people - she was such a bully, back in camp._ But that's not quite right. It's not that either of them are different now. She's just letting him see a side of her that was always there, but never obvious before.

It occurs to him to wonder how much of himself he revealed last night, hopes and fears and small seditions, but he doesn't think he needs to worry. She's a bully, sure, among other things, but she's not a snitch.

The sun is shining that day, high and clear and distant, and his pack is heavy on his shoulders as they start to find their way back down the mountain, but he feels lighter all the same, like he left something behind in the storm that he's been carrying for a long, long time.


End file.
